In this manuscript, the author demonstrates how a new idea of the future came into being in eighteenth-century France with the development of modern biological, economic, and social engineering. With the emergence of these practices, the future transformed from something that was largely believed to be predetermined and beyond significant human intervention into something that could be significantly affected through actions in the present. Focusing on the second-half of the century, The author argues that specific mechanisms for constructing the future (...) first arose through the development of practices and instruments aimed at countering degeneration. In their attempts to regenerate a healthy natural state, Enlightenment philosophes created the means to exceed previously recognized limits and create a future that was not merely a recuperation of the past, but was fundamentally different from it. The new active orientation to the future that emerged from these practices was not something that was explicitly articulated during the Enlightenment. Instead this practical orientation must be seen as an implicit understanding of historical temporality. Historical actors often had a tacit knowledge of time--one that they worked with--without necessarily being fully aware of it or articulating it explicitly in their writing. The full articulation of the new idea of the future did not occur until the French Revolution, but the practical understanding of it that developed during the Enlightenment played an important role in making possible the French revolutionaries' unprecedented attempts to remake the world completely anew. (shrink)

For the past 40 years, philosophers have generally assumed that a key to understanding mental representation is to develop a naturalistic theory of representational content. This has led to an outlook where the importance of content has been heavily inflated, while the significance of the representational vehicles has been somewhat downplayed. However, the success of this enterprise has been thwarted by a number of mysterious and allegedly non-naturalizable, irreducible dimensions of representational content. The challenge of addressing these difficulties has come (...) to be known as the “hard problem of content” (Hutto & Myin, 2012), and many think it makes an account of representation in the brain impossible. In this essay, I argue that much of this is misguided and based upon the wrong set of priorities. If we focus on the functionality of representational vehicles (as recommended by teleosemanticists) and remind ourselves of the quirks associated with many functional entities, we can see that the allegedly mysterious and intractable aspects of content are really just mundane features associated with many everyday functional kinds. We can also see they have little to do with content and more to do with representation function. Moreover, we can begin to see that our explanatory priorities are backwards: instead of expecting a theory of content to be the key to understanding how a brain state can function as a representation, we should instead expect a theory of neural representation function to serve as the key to understanding how content occurs naturally. (shrink)

In Change of View: Principles of Reasoning, Gilbert Harman argues that (i) all genuine reasoning is a matter of belief revision, and that, since (ii) logic is not "specially relevant" to belief revision, (iii) logic is not specially relevant to reasoning, either. Thus, Harman suggests, what is needed is a "theory of reasoning"-which, incidentally, will be psychologistic, telling us both how we do and how we should reason. I argue that Harman fails to establish the need for such a theory, (...) because (a) reasoning is not always a matter of belief revision, and (b) logic is, in fact, of the utmost relevance to both reasoning and belief revision. (shrink)

It is often suggested that Frege refuted logical psychologism. Recently, however, several new versions of psychologism have emerged. These new psychologisms tend to be theories, not of deductive logic, but, rather, of epistemic justification, scientific method, belief revision, and other roughly epistemological matters. I develop a general account of psychologism, and argue that, at bottom, the new psychologisms fail for roughly the same reasons that logical psychologism fails. In the first half of the dissertation, I argue that, at bottom, psychologism (...) is a form of relativism. I then develop an original account of relativism, and novel arguments against both justificatory and alethic relativism. In the second half of the dissertation, I consider four prominent examples of the new psychologisms in detail . I show that, by employing the philosophical apparatus developed in the first half of the dissertation, all of these views can be shown to fail. (shrink)

IntroductionThere is an enormous amount of confusion about what relativism is. In this paper I aim to take a step toward clarifying what it is by discussing some things that it is not — that is, by distinguishing it from some other views with which it is often confused or conflated, such as nihilism and scepticism. I do this primarily because I think that the question of the character of relativism is interesting in itself. A clearer characterization of relativism would (...) also be important instrumentally, however, as before we can accurately assess relativism we must have a clear idea of what it is. The secondary aim of this paper, then, is to function as a prolegomenon to an assessment of relativism. The tertiary aim of the paper is to make a few observations about the view which most clearly stands opposed to relativism, the view which I will call ‘objectivism.’ Because relativism is often confused with views like fallibilism and pluralism, objectivism often finds itself unjustly associated with views like infallibilism and political authoritarianism. Although it is not the point of this paper to criticize relativism, I should make it clear that it began as a part of an anti-relativistic project, and, although anti-relativism is not necessarily objectivism, I should perhaps make it clear that I am more than a little sympathetic to the latter type of view. (shrink)

In the United States, physicians are Increasingly functioning In the consultative role. This change in role Is undoubtedly a result of a surge in the numbers of specialists, the relative decreasing number of primary care physicians, and the emergence of tertiary care centers as primary treatment providers. This change In the style of practicing medicine has led to role confusion In attending physician-patient-consultant relationships.

Our objective is to understand how parents and children perceive their roles in decision making about research participation. Forty-five children (ages 4-15 years) with or without a chronic condition and 21 parents were the participants. A semistructured interview assessed perceptions of up to 4 hypothetical research scenarios with varying levels of risk, benefit, and complexity. Children were also administered the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Third Edition, to assess verbal ability, as a proxy for the child's cognitive development. The audiotaped interviews (...) were transcribed and analyzed for themes related to parent and child decision-making roles. Both parents and children varied in their perceptions of decision-making roles. Child perceptions of parental influence on decision making as knowledge-based increased with cognitive development, whereas perceptions of parental influence as power-based decreased. Both children and parents commented that they would collaborate with each other when making decisions. Collaborative decision making appeared to increase with cognitive development. These findings suggest that approaches to child assent and parent permission should consider the parent-child relationship and how children and families typically make decisions. Future research is necessary to explain variation in the process of research decision making across children and families, explore the role of collaboration on children's decision-making skills, and understand developmental trajectories and mechanisms related to research decision making. (shrink)

Appellate Court Modifications Extraction consists of, given an Appellate Court decision, identifying the proposed modifications by the upper Court of the lower Court judge’s decision. In this work, we propose a system to extract Appellate Court Modifications for Portuguese. Information extraction for legal texts has been previously addressed using different techniques and for several languages. Our proposal differs from previous work in two ways: our corpus is composed of Brazilian Appellate Court decisions, in which we look for a set of (...) modifications provided by the Court; and to automatically extract the modifications, we use a traditional Machine Learning approach and a Deep Learning approach, both as alternative solutions and as a combined solution. We tackle the Appellate Court Modifications Extraction task, experimenting with a wide variety of methods. In order to train and evaluate the system, we have built the KauaneJunior corpus, using public data disclosed by the Appellate State Court of Rio de Janeiro jurisprudence database. Our best method, which is a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory network combined with Conditional Random Fields, obtained an \ score of 94.79%. (shrink)

This is Volume V of twenty-two of a collection on 20th Century Philosophy. Originally published in 1964, this collection contains original papers assembled and representative in their styles, methods, and preoccupations. The various problems here discussed where to the author both important and unsolved: if others are stimulated to make further progress in solving them, the main purpose of this collection will have been achieved.

This classic text, written by philosopher and mathematician William Thomson, presents a systematic exposition of the laws of thought and their role in science, logic, and philosophy. The book is still widely used in philosophy and mathematics courses today. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. (...) Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

We propose that the six mechanisms identified by Juslin & Vll (J&V) fall into two categories: signal detection and amplification. Signal detection mechanisms are unmediated and induce emotion by directly detecting emotive signals in music. Amplifiers act in conjunction with signal detection mechanisms. We also draw attention to theoretical and empirical challenges associated with the proposed mechanisms.

Our primary focus is on analysis of the concept of voluntariness, with a secondary focus on the implications of our analysis for the concept and the requirements of voluntary informed consent. We propose that two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions must be satisfied for an action to be voluntary: intentionality, and substantial freedom from controlling influences. We reject authenticity as a necessary condition of voluntary action, and we note that constraining situations may or may not undermine voluntariness, depending on the (...) circumstances and the psychological capacities of agents. We compare and evaluate several accounts of voluntariness and argue that our view, unlike other treatments in bioethics, is not a value-laden theory. We also discuss the empirical assessment of individuals? perceptions of the degrees of noncontrol and self-control. We propose use of a particular Decision Making Control Instrument. Empirical research using this instrument can provide data that will help establish appropriate policies and procedures for obtaining voluntary consent to research. (shrink)

Over the past several years, discoveries from mouse genetics have had direct impact on our understanding of vitamin A metabolism. Although the metabolism of vitamin A in the mouse does have some special features (for example very large stores of liver and pulmonary retinyl esters), the ability to construct knockout and transgenic mouse models has yielded an impressive amount of information directly relevant to understanding the general principles of vitamin A transport, storage and degradation. We discuss below the metabolism of (...) vitamin A through a number of genetically engineered mouse strains with alterations in genes that affect this metabolism. The novelty of this experimental approach is evidenced by the fact that the oldest of these strains was first reported only eight years ago.1) BioEssays 23:409–419, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

The role of power in healthcare can raise many ethical challenges. Power is ownership, whether given, ceded, or taken of another person’s autonomy. When a person has power over someone else, they can control or strongly influence the decision-making freedom of that person. From the principalist perspective1,2 of healthcare ethics, denying a person their freedom to choose, should only occur when justifying conditions related to beneficence and nonmaleficence are sufficiently satisfied. In healthcare, it is rare to be able to identify (...) situations where paternalism is justified. However, experience suggests that abusive power in healthcare is used too frequently without justifying criteria. (shrink)

No satisfactory answers were received for the following questions.

To better understand the available publications addressing ethical issues in rural health care we sought to identify the ethics literature that specifically focuses on rural America. We wanted to determine the extent to which the rural ethics literature was distributed between general commentaries, descriptive summaries of research, and original research publications. We identified 55 publications that specifically and substantively addressed rural health care ethics, published between 1966 and 2004. Only 7 (13%) of these publications were original research articles while (12) (...) 22% were descriptive summaries of research and 36 (65%) were general commentaries. The majority of publications examined (55%) were clinically focused while 27% addressed organizational ethics and 18% addressed ethical ramifications of rural health care policy at a national or community level. Our findings indicate that there are a limited number of publications focusing on rural health care ethics, suggesting a need for scholars and researchers to more rigorously address rural ethics issues. (shrink)

Since children are considered incapable ofgiving informed consent to participate inresearch, regulations require that bothparental permission and the assent of thepotential child subject be obtained. Assent andpermission are uniquely bound together, eachserving a different purpose. Parentalpermission protects the child from assumingunreasonable risks. Assent demonstrates respectfor the child and his developing autonomy. Inorder to give meaningful assent, the child mustunderstand that procedures will be performed,voluntarily choose to undergo the procedures,and communicate this choice. Understanding theelements of informed consent has been theparadigm for (...) assessing capacity to give assent.This method leaves the youngest, leastcognitively mature children vulnerable towaiver of assent and forced researchparticipation. Voluntariness can also becompromised by the influence of authorityfigures who can exert undue influence andcoerce children to participate in research. This paper discusses factors that may influencethe decision to give assent/permission,potential parent-child conflict in theassent/permission process and how it isresolved, and potential parental undueinfluence on research participation. Theseissues are illustrated with quotations drawnfrom a larger qualitative study of parentalpermission and child assent (data notpresented). We suggest a developmentalapproach, viewing assent as a continuum rangingfrom mere affirmation in the youngest childrento the equivalent of the informed consentprocess in the mature adolescent. (shrink)

We hypothesize that aspects of animal multicellularity originated before the divergence of metazoans from fungi and social amoebae. Polarized epithelial tissues are a defining feature of metazoans and contribute to the diversity of animal body plans. The recent finding of a polarized epithelium in the non‐metazoan social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum demonstrates that epithelial tissue is not a unique feature of metazoans, and challenges the traditional paradigm that multicellularity evolved independently in social amoebae and metazoans. An alternative view, presented here, is (...) that the common ancestor of social amoebae, fungi, and animals spent a portion of its life cycle in a multicellular state and possessed molecular machinery necessary for forming an epithelial tissue. Some descendants of this ancestor retained multicellularity, while others reverted to unicellularity. This hypothesis makes testable predictions regarding tissue organization in close relatives of metazoans and provides a novel conceptual framework for studies of early animal evolution.Editor's suggested further reading in BioEssays Searching for Eve: Basal metazoans and the evolution of multicellular complexity Abstract. (shrink)

In Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Kripke's Wittgenstein argues that it is possible for individuals in communities to speak a language and otherwise follow rules, but impossible for a single, conceptually isolated individual to do so. I show that the roots of the argument lie in his general account of the legitimacy of practices, and that he actually argues for two distinct conclusions: (a) solitary individuals cannot have useful practices of rule‐following and (b) solitary individuals cannot place substantive restrictions (...) on their own behavior. I show that if it is, in fact, possible for individuals in communities to use language and follow rules, then both of Kripke's Wittgenstein's anti‐solitary language arguments fails; and, furthermore, that his general account not only fails to exclude the possibility of solitary language‐use and rule‐following, it actually guarantees their possibility. (shrink)

Like biological species, languages change over time. As noted by Darwin, there are many parallels between language evolution and biological evolution. Insights into these parallels have also undergone change in the past 150 years. Just like genes, words change over time, and language evolution can be likened to genome evolution accordingly, but what kind of evolution? There are fundamental differences between eukaryotic and prokaryotic evolution. In the former, natural variation entails the gradual accumulation of minor mutations in alleles. In the (...) latter, lateral gene transfer is an integral mechanism of natural variation. The study of language evolution using biological methods has attracted much interest of late, most approaches focusing on language tree construction. These approaches may underestimate the important role that borrowing plays in language evolution. Network approaches that were originally designed to study lateral gene transfer may provide more realistic insights into the complexities of language evolution.Editor's suggested further reading in BioEssaysLinguistic evidence supports date for Homeric epics Abstract. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the normative content of Kant's formula of humanity (FH). More specifically, does FH, as some seem to think, imply the specific and rigid prescriptions in 'standard' deontological theories? To this latter question, I argue, the answer is 'no'. I propose reading FH largely through the formula of autonomy and the formula of the kingdom of ends, where I understand FA to describe the nature of the capacity of humanity-a capacity for self-governance. The latter, I suggest, (...) is akin to the capacity for planning and intentional action described in Michael Bratman's work. A significant part of what FH requires, I then propose, is that we exercise these capacities for planning in such a way that we accommodate and coordinate with the (permissible) plans and intentions of others. Kant himself, as do many commentators, emphasizes the idea that our human capacities give us a distinctive kind of value. On my interpretation, by contrast, what is fundamentally important is not the value of the capacities but rather what they make possible: distinctive ways of mistreating (using) persons, but also a distinctive kind of morally desirable relationship. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)